i'm an incarcerated guy. incarceration was not the same as rehabilitation for me. it just wasn't the same. but i have been over 500 jails and prisons in 23 years. i speak nine languages now. they're all english, but i speak fortune 500. i speak corporate, i speak kid. i have a 5-year-old. he is safe all day in the home that i have created, not the one i grew up in. my wife is an afflicted convicted lady. she actually did more jail time than i did she has seniority at home. [laughter] >> normal people don't laugh right there at all. don't the wives only have seniority? yes, especially in the penal system. but that was a double-edged sword there, i hope you got it. some of your pot smokers or ex-pot smokers, the jokes won't kick in for a long time. marijuana retards the ha ha muscle. three months from now somebody will go they're all different dads. sorry, your honor, i apologize, i wasn't laughing at you. [laughter] >> the concept here of humor as a basis for approaching a topic that is awkward to discuss has never been a mystery to us. the art of that is sometimes

i do not believe that incarceration has taken us where we need to be. i believe the war on drugs has been a failure. when we institutionalize people over extended periods of time, we take low-level offenders in the early stages and harden them and we send them to the university of crime. by the time they get out of prison, they become a bigger social problem. where i come from, whether it is the [unintelligible] i am on the side of saying we need to reform our system and reduce the number of people we send to jail or prison. we need to reserve that space for people that are truly dangerous and have no way of fixing themselves. we have to realize there will be some people that will go to prison because the rest of us need to have some people in prison in order for us to be safe but that is a small minority. there are many other solutions out there whether it is someone who has engaged in drugs or has a drug addiction. or engaging in some other low- level crime. every move away from a cursory those people in the early stages and deal with different forms

just have a threat of a misdemeanor, period, of incarceration. the other thing i would say is that the respect trend has actually has been to implement shorter periods of flash incarceration so you actually provide an immediate sanction to address a particular problem which has had -- based on the research i've seen, greater success in changing behaviors because it's more of a cognitive behavior model and like a reward-punishment immediate system, whereas just putting people in state prison and browsing he -- warehousing them for extended periods of time where we all know going to prison doesn't mean you have access to illegal nhra catics, that doesn't seem either to necessarily be a solution. -- illegal narcotics that that doesn't seem either to be necessarily a solution. >> i promised to marty we'd be careful to give him equal time here. >> that's all right. that's all right. i already feel the glow of san francisco's progressive approach to things. and in defense to the other counties, i think that, you know, that's the challenge we always fac

and if you look at other jurisdictions throughout the state, you'll find heavy incarceration rates and not used. in fact the prosecutor is not using those programs. we're very fortunate in our district attorney. he is very visionary, and i just commend him for his stepping out there and taking this position which i support, also, in terms of we have got to focus on treatment rather than say, well, there's this program or that program when in fact the state hasn't funded it. so it's placed that burden on the local counties. >> tal, can you respond to marty's point and wendy's? >> i can say just based on my experience in dealing with individuals who have drug problems, most of the time i don't think that the threat of a quote, unquote, felony conviction is going to necessarily prevent them from using. i think what would make more sense is to provide them with more services and to be more individualized in terms of treatment and how we address specific individuals. i also would note that when you are facing a misdemeanor charge, you're facing up to a year in county jail. now, sometimes yo

we rank first in the world in the per capita incarceration of our fellow citizens. the russians are fading fast in second or third place together with the belarus people. the rates of the incarceration are five, six, seven, eight times than most in other societies, europe and elsewhere, though their rates of nonviolent crime and drug use are not that much different than ours. so if another country were to lock up its own people at the rate that we do, and if our rates of incarceration were more normative to the rest of the world, we would regard with that other country was doing as a massive violation of human rights. that's the way we would look at it. now, the other point here is what we're doing is not even consistent with american history. i mean, we had 500,000 people behind bars in 1980 and now we have 2.3 million, 2.4 million people behind bars and almost have 5,000 people behind bars just for a drug violation. there are as many people behind bars for a drug violation than we had for everything in 1980. it's not consistent with global standards and not consis

but i'll tell the incarcerated, hey, if life was fair, you wouldn't be in here right now. you would have parents that cared and gave you the road map to success and they stuck around. they didn't hurt you on wait. they go yeah. if life was fair, you wouldn't have been busted when your partner wasn't. yeah. they love that one a lot. and then i'll say this well, if they locked you up for everything you really did do criminally, when would you get out? they don't like that one at all. so i'm blessed to be here for a brief period of time this afternoon and i'll tell you this, the first thought wrong is my problem. i was flying out of san jose airport which i do about 200 times a year and i know everybody there. i have been flying out of there 15 years and the t.s.a. guy was new. new people hop. they don't stand still. new people. i don't care if it's a starbucks employee, which i love starbucks! i make my coffee like fudge. you have coffee with me in the morning, here, you want a piece? [laughter] well, that's good, isn't it? wow. normal people drink decaffeinated coffee. what

i think that you still have the majority of those individuals who were incarcerated with state prison for possession either had strike priors, serious offenses, or they had pled down from a sales case. >> tal, let me ask you to respond to perhaps marty's point. you're a deputy public offender in san francisco and you've handled dozens of drug case, drug possession cases, you've been -- a lot of people caught their attention when you were quoted in the press saying the way we handle drug enforcement here in california is in effect a war on crumbs instead of the often used phrase on drugs. how do you respond to his remarks? >> well, i think the first thing that we have to recognize is that the majority of people who are caught up in the criminal justice system and who are prosecuted for this type of offense for possession offenses and to some degree possession for sale offenses, the vast majority are indigent people and the vast majority of those indigent people are people of color. so what you have are two systems in place. you have a system where privileged white middle class people b